In the last two days the media in every nook and cranny of the planet has been abuzz with “news” about the Syrian military loading “precursor chemicals for the deadly sarin nerve gas into aerial bombs” and “awaiting final orders from President Bashar al-Assad” before using these “chemical weapons.” NBC and CNN in the US, among thousands of media channels all over the world, have been spreading this “information” attributed mainly to US officials.

Neither USofficials nor the media has offered an iota of evidence to support their reckless allegations. Are there eye-witness accounts of the Syrian military making these preparations? Is there documentary proof? Has any military analyst of repute from even those countries allied to the US come out in the open to endorse these baseless statements?

How can we believe outrageous claims of this sort when we know for a fact that the US elite has on a number of occasions in the past concocted stories about “evil measures” adopted by its adversary which have turned out to be monstrous lies? Have we forgotten what happened in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003 when the mainstream media --- the same media that is busy with Syria’s sarin gas today--- was repeating ad nauseam bogus tales of Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)? How many of us still remember that diabolical deceit about babies being pulled out of incubators and thrown onto the floor of a Kuwaiti hospital by Iraqi soldiers in the wake of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990? How about the other incident of a high US official showing the late King Fahd of Saudi Arabia fictitious satellite pictures of Iraqi troops amassed at the Saudi border in order to convince him to allow the US to establish an air-base on Saudi soil? And what about the wholesale fabrication of a so-called Viet Cong attack upon US aircraft over the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964 which was used as the justification for the carpet-bombing of Vietnam that led eventually to the annihilation of 3 million people?

There is every reason to believe that the US and its allies are once again creating a scenario that will serve as the rationale for yet another military intervention in West Asia. Simply put, they are manufacturing an excuse for the invasion of Syria in order to oust the Bashar government and replace it with a pliant regime that will serve the interests of the US, Britain, France, Israel, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.

If we have any integrity or dignity in us as human beings and as citizens of the world we should not allow ourselves to be duped by yet another nefarious lie.

Dr. Chandra Muzaffar,President, International Movement for a Just World (JUST).Malaysia.